Climate change, securitisation of nature, and resilient urbanism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Securitisation and 'Riskification': Second-order Security and the Politics of Climate Change
Millennium-Journal of International Studies, 2012
Risk-security writers of various persuasions have suggested that risk is effectively the new security. They say risk works to widen securitisation whereby exceptional measures are made permanent and introduced to deal with merely potential, hypothetical and less-than-existential dangers. A transformation in the political logic of the security field of this kind is a potentially problematic and momentous change. However, this has so far not been much reflected in the primary theory of what security is, namely the Copenhagen School’s theory of securitisation. This article tries to tackle this problem by identifying the distinct logic of speech acts that turn issues into questions of risk politics suggesting a model for what rules or grammars they follow and what the political implications of them are. A separate kind of speech act – ‘riskification’ – is identified based on a re-theorisation of what distinguishes ‘risks’ from ‘threats’. It is argued that risk politics is not an instance of securitisation, but something distinct with its own advantages and dangers. Threat-based security deals with direct causes of harm, whereas risk-security is oriented towards the conditions of possibility or constitutive causes of harm a kind of ‘second-order’ security politics that promotes long-term precautionary governance. Separating securitisation and ‘riskification’ preserves the analytical precision of the Copenhagen School notion of securitisation, makes a new logic of security understandable to analysts of the security field, and helps to clarify what basic logic ‘normal’ non-securitised politics may follow. The new framework is demonstrated through a critical reading of literature that has suggested that climate change has been securitised.
Beyond securitisation and into posthumanism in climate change discourses and practices
Climate change has been generally depicted in catastrophic and apocalyptic terms by politicians, activists, academics, and journalists alike. However, within this quite homogenous habit, two strands of discursive practices connected to the securitisation of climate change can be discerned: one focussed on state security, and another on ecologic security. The first builds on the securitisation of migration to propose climate change policies that reinforce borders, hence engaging only with one of the presumed effects of climate change – namely, cross-border displacement. The second strand of securitisation is on the other hand attentive to the effects of climate change on the entire planet as well as on humanity. In this paper, I ask whether securitisation can be an effective method to tackle climate change, and I find that a posthuman approach could be suited to reinforce ecologic security and create sustainable, long-term policies that consider the whole of humanity and of the planet when countering climate change. In order to make this claim, I draw from critical race theorists’ intuitions that climate change has deeply intersectional roots and effects.
Insuring 'Our Common Future'? Dangerous Climate Change and the Biopolitics of Environmental Security
Geopolitics
Dire warnings on the “dangers” of climate change are reinvigorating past debates over environmental security. However, one strain of this debate is exceeding the state-based logics of security found in more conventional environmental security approaches. The UNFCCC's goal of avoiding “dangerous climate change” that, inter alia, threatens sustainable development has inspired volumes of research on climate change mitigation and adaptation, and has increasingly become incorporated into World Bank and UN development programmes. However, much of this research has yet to examine the cultural and political effects of framing climate change through the loaded language of security. As a result, there has been little critical analysis of the emergence of a variety of disaster risk management and insurance-based adaptation strategies that attempt to offer security against the effects of dangerous climate change. This article articulates the insights of critical environmental security studies with recent research on biopolitical security and post-structural critiques of development to unpack the biopolitical and geopolitical assumptions that animate discourses on dangerous climate change and disasters. My argument here is twofold. First, I suggest that risk management and catastrophe insurance have political effects: these biopolitical technologies sustain the global social and political order that the history of Western-led “development” has produced. Second, along these lines, dangerous climate change discourses extend the project of earlier environmental security discourses, specifically, the attempt to secure Western ways of life against the effects of environmental change. In securing “sustainable development,” discourses on dangerous climate change combine biopolitical technologies of risk management with geopolitical technologies of security to sustain the exclusion and containment of underdeveloped populations, and the mobility of the global elite, that characterise contemporary practices of development.
‘Urban Ecological Security’: A New Urban Paradigm?
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2009
The term 'ecological security' is usually used in relation to attempts to safeguard flows of ecological resources, infrastructure and services at the national scale. But increasing concerns over 'urban ecological security' (UES) are now giving rise to strategies to reconfigure cities and their infrastructures in ways that help to secure their ecological and material reproduction. Yet cities have differing capacities and capabilities to develop strategic responses to the opportunities and constraints of key urban ecological security concerns such as resource constraint and climate change, and consequently these newly emerging strategies may selectively privilege particular urban areas and particular social interests over others. Consequently in this article we focus on world cities and outline the challenges posed by the growing concern for urban ecological security and review the emerging responses that may increasingly form a new dominant 'logic' of infrastructure provision, which we characterise as Secure Urbanism and Resilient Infrastructure (SURI). We conclude by addressing the extent to which this new dominant 'logic' underpins a new strategy of accumulation or a more 'progressive' politics, by outlining alternatives to SURI, possibilities to shape SURI more 'progressively' and developing an agenda for future research.
Gentrifying climate change: Ecological modernisation and the cultural politics of definition
M/C Journal, Vol. 15, No. 3, 2012
Obscured in contemporary climate change discourse is the fact that under even the most serious mitigation scenarios being envisaged it will be virtually impossible to avoid runaway ecosystem collapse; so great is the momentum of global greenhouse build-up. And under even the best-case scenario, two-degree warming, the ecological, social, and economic costs are proving to be much deeper than first thought. The greenhouse genie is out of the bottle, but the best that appears to be on offer is a gradual transition to the pro-growth, pro-consumption discourse of “ecological modernisation” (EM); anything more seems politically unpalatable. Here, I aim to account for how cheaply EM has managed to allay ecology. To do so, I detail the operations of the co-optive, definitional strategy which I call the “high-ground” strategy, waged by a historic bloc of actors, discourses, and institutions with a common interest in resisting radical social and ecological critique. This is not an argument about climate laggards like the United States and Australia where sceptic views remain near the centre of public debate. It is a critique of climate leaders such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands—nations at the forefront of the adoption of EM policies and discourses.
Climate Change and the Language of Human Security
2013
The language of ‘human security’ arose in the 1990s, including from UN work on ‘human development’. What contributions can it make, if any, to the understanding and especially the valuation of and response to the impacts of climate change? How does it compare and relate to other languages used in describing the emergent crises and in seeking to guide response, including languages of ‘externalities’, public goods and incentives, cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis? The paper examines in particular the formulations in those terms in Stiglitz's Making Globalization Work and Stern's The Economics of Climate Change and Blueprint for a Safer Planet, and how these authors are left groping for frameworks to motivate the changes required for global sustainability. It undertakes comparison also with the languages of human development and human rights, and suggests that, not least through enriching our skills of ‘narrative imagination’, the human security framework supports a series of essential changes in orientation—in our conceptions of selfhood, well-being and situatedness in Nature—and supports a required greater solidarity and greater awareness of our inter-connectedness.
The securitization of climate change and the power of conceptions of security
S+F, 2009
This paper looks at recent studies that have addressed climate change as a security issue. Posing climate change as a pro blem for security has provided it with a major boost in attention. However, it raises the potential of 'securitization', i.e. that the issue is primarily addressed via traditional means of security policy. The paper analyses how selected studies frame the issue of climate change and security and considers what recommendations they make on dealing with the problem. Among its findings are that the framing of climate change as a security issue is not based on well founded analysis but is rather largely driven by ad hoc theo ries on the links between environmental degradation and violent conflict. A second finding is that different conceptualisations of security lead to different types of recommendation on how to deal with the consequences of climate change as they relate to peace and security. Securitizing the issue therefore does not necessarily lead the authors of studies to prescribe predominantly traditional security instruments for dealing with crises. However, although the authors reach different conclusions, their diagnosis of climate change as a security issue is likely to push the climate change discourse towards the use of traditional security instruments. A third finding of the paper is therefore that the mixing of different conceptions of security may increase the 'attention grabbing' power of studies but also muddle their messages.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2019
** PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT, PLEASE VIEW LINK BELOW FOR FINAL VERSION ** https://www.ijurr.org/article/ecological-gentrification-in-response-to-apocalyptic-narratives-of-climate-change-the-production-of-an-immuno%e2%80%90political-fantasy/ Anxieties over the potential impacts of climate change, often framed in apocalyptic language, are having a profound but little-studied effect on the contemporary western urbanscape. This paper examines the ways in which current theorisations of 'Ecological Gentrification' express only half the process, describing how green space is used for social control, but not how ecology is used as a justification regime for such projects. As urbanites seek out housing and living practices which have a lower environmental impact, urban planners have responded by providing large-scale regeneration of the urbanscape. With the demand for this housing increasing, questions of inequality, displacement and dispossession arise. I ask whether apocalyptic anxiety is being enrolled in the justification regimes of these projects to make them hard-to-resist at the planning and implementation stages. The paper shows that in capitalizing on collective anxiety surrounding an apocalyptic future, these projects depoliticize Subjects by using the empty signifier of 'Sustainability' leading them into an immuno-political relationship to the urbanscape. This leaves Subjects feeling protected from both responsibility for and the impacts of climate change. Ultimately this has the consequence of gentrification coupled with potentially worsening consumptive practices, rebound effects and the depoliticization of the environmentally-conscious urbanite.
A new urban dispositif? Governing life in an age of climate change
In an interview in 1977 Michel Foucault proposed the term dispositif for a heterogeneous set of discourses, practices, architectural forms, regulations, laws, and knowledges connected together into an apparatus of government. Drawing upon later articulations of the concept by Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, and exploring a range of innovations in the 'management' of urban life, this paper reworks Foucault's concept as a means for understanding-and potentially contesting-new modes of government that have emerged in response to the crisis of climate change. Against understandings of 'government' in terms of a totalizing plan from which new practices and technologies usher forth, this paper emphasizes the ad hoc, and ex post facto nature of 'government' as a set of diverse and loosely connected efforts to introduce 'economy' into existing relations in response to a perceived 'crisis'. The paper concludes by exploring Agamben's notion of 'profanation' as an adequate political response to the dispositif of resilient urbanism.